


The Loveliest Dream

by ninamazing



Category: Firefly, Kill Bill (2003 2004), Serenity (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-11
Updated: 2006-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:54:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninamazing/pseuds/ninamazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Doesn't really tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. That comment was a little artistic license on the part of the captain.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Loveliest Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, you read that right. This is an Extreme (Xtreme, even! :P) Crackfic of Doom, in which Bad Shit Happens and I use dialogue from _Kill Bill Vol. 2_ to drive a conversation between Mal and River. (Please don't sue me, Quentin Tarantino.) I don't know who you should blame for this one, but I hope it's good. I'm really curious about voice and tone on this one, so any comments you can give me would be _much_ appreciated. Also, am I overusing italics? I'm a girl who enjoys her italics.

Mal found her on Lilac. She had traded her black-buckled beasts for cowboy boots, as they were a little lighter, more stylish, less outstanding on a world like this. The skin underneath her eyes was almost imperceptibly thicker, and there were two long lines running from her nose to the edges of her mouth that he would swear hadn't been there before. Otherwise, she was the same. Still crazy, as any of us is crazy; still beautiful; still a killer, just by talking at you.

"Hello, kiddo."

She had seen him sidle up to her as she stood outside the chapel. They were in the middle of a desert scorched by two full-size suns, but holographics made a lush oasis possible. River smiled; she touched a palm leaf. She didn't look at him.

"How did you find me?"

"I'm the man."

After the war outside Miranda Mal had become just that: there were free drinks for him everywhere, quick and alcoholic ways for folk to cover up the shame they felt at a sadness they could not express. It had been a good couple of weeks, those days.

"What are you doing here?" River asked. She could have found out in a second, if she'd wanted to, but she'd shut out that part of herself for a reason. She didn't want to know. For the first time since they'd touched down on the planet with silent voices, she was afraid.

"What am I doin'?" Mal repeated, and grinned. He took a step towards her, and she finally looked at him. His blue eyes were blazing. He'd never had passion like that before -- not once.

"Well," he continued, "moment ago I was playin' Jayne's guitar. At this moment, I'm lookin' at the most beautiful bride these old eyes had ever seen."

Mal had always made more of age than he needed. He wasn't a day past fifty, and had a hundred more years to live, he played his cards right -- but on the other hand, perhaps his eyes _were_ old enough to be weary.

The operatives had come, and come, and come. Trained since childhood. They killed Simon first, and while the blood spilled out of his eyes and nose and Kaylee's rich scream was cut off by a viper knife, River was gasping, in ecstacy, splayed back underneath Mal's covers, every other thought forced out of her brain but _please_ and _God_ and _Mal_ and _love_ \-- above all, love.

Doesn't really tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. That comment was a little artistic license on the part of the captain.

"Why are you here?" she asked him now, and her tear ducts began to betray her.

"Last look." Mal gave her one of his intolerable smirks: you blinked, and it was gone.

"Are you gonna be nice?"

Poor River already knew, even without the conjurin', that he meant to kill her. Kill her baby, kill the congregation, kill the sweet little farmhand who was to bear the ring, kill Tommy Lee, who was 30 and nerdy and still as adorably innocent as Mr. Universe himself.

Mal just laughed.

"River," he told her, "I ain't never been nice in my whole life.

"But I'll do my best to be sweet."

River remembered listening to Saffron as she spoke to Mal -- twenty years ago! -- enjoying the dichotomy between her words and her intentions. She'd never dreamed to find a man so sweet; when she said it, River had believed the lie and made it truth. That had been the beginning of the end.

She remembered that now, as she answered, with a softness to her tone, "I always told you your sweet side was your best side."

He took another step.

"I guess that's why, darlin'," he responded, "you're the only one who's ever seen it."

 _That isn't true_ , she thought desperately, and hated herself at the same time for gloating, _Mal needed a dancer, and I'm the only one who saw his sweet side._ Mal-That-Was could still make her jealous. _Ain't that somethin'?_ he might say, and she saw it as clearly as she'd seen the way to make Badger talk, had to restrain herself from saying the words out loud, now, to the Captain-Who-Wasn't that stood beside her.

"So you got a bun in the oven," he remarked.

This time it was she who turned to face him more fully, and took a step -- forward, to show him she wasn't afraid. _A useless gesture. Honor in a den full of thieves. Baby's still gonna die. Can see it as --_

"I'm knocked up," she told him, smiling with all her teeth. River hadn't lost her smile. She never would, not really.

Mal nodded. He would pretend he didn't miss the smile, just so she could have the pain of seeing through his ruse.

"Jeez, Louise," came his interjection. "That young man of yours sure don't believe in wasting time, does he?"

River shook her head. A tear, unbidden, slipped down her cheek, and from somewhere dark in her mind Mal-That-Was reached and brushed it away. They'd been so far from death, back then.

Or had they?

She was better than his baiting.

"Have you --" She swallowed. "Have you seen Tommy?"

"Big guy in the tux?" Mal wrinkled his nose. Nothin' irked him more than an Independent dressed in Alliance _fei hua_ fancy gear.

"Yes," River told him.

"Then I saw him." A touch of the old, flippant Mal returned. "I like his hair."

It was almost a whisper when it came out of her mouth -- her mind was screaming so loudly there was no room left for words: "You promised you'd be nice."

"No," said Mal, and this was every bit the Captain who had heard the gun and shoved off her, done his pants in double time without seeing her again (as she sat on the bed, forgotten and hurting and naked and speechless), found the bodies of her brother and his sister, watched on the newswire the burning of the largest Companion Training House near the borderworlds, only had to glance down Zoe's stairway to glimpse her dead and raped at the bottom. They'd left him, him and Jayne and River, and there was blood all over Zoe's cabin that ended at her feet where she dropped at last from exhaustion. She'd avenged herself and Wash and Simon and Kaylee, though she didn't know it yet, and a little bit of Shepherd Book, and some Inara, but she killed the twenty only after they'd already marked her a dead woman.

It was the end of life, but solely for those who were lucky enough not to have to go on. For the first few years Mal wouldn't let River put a bullet to him, and Jayne wouldn't look at his guns anymore without starting to shake. Something about Simon, murmuring and loving at the back of her mind, had kept River from burning up with Mal, from wanting a murdering rage.

The Alliance, after all, had already given her one. It wasn't a path she was willing to walk a second time.

"No," Mal said again. "I didn't promise. I said I'd do my best, and that ain't hardly a promise.

"But you're right," and another smile. "What does your young man do for a living?"

A last bastion of normalcy before he slaughtered her. River couldn't kill him, and she still loved him enough to let him kill her. Mal-That-Was would be there, in the sunlight beyond. Something about Simon told her that reality wasn't ever this bad.

She smiled without a trace of bitterness, ready to continue the high-class shindig conversation.

"He runs a cortex archive," she informed him, "here on Lilac. Data storage for the whole planet."

"Ah. 'Puter lover, eh?"

"He's fond of technology."

"Aren't we all?" returned Mal, and in the old days River would have teased him that he wouldn't even use a double-barreled shotgun. Now she just let him continue: "And what are you doing for a J. O. B. these days?"

Another winning smile, from a sweetheart who'd once been a graduate student in physics at the age of fourteen, to an honest boy who'd enlisted in the army at seventeen carryin' his mama's hankie.

"I transcribe the data log to assembly language," River answered. She knew he wouldn't understand it. She'd always liked that.

"Ahh, so," he said, as droll and confident as ever. "It all suddenly seems so clear." He paused, and flashed her what was truly the best of his smirks. "Do you like it?"

"Yeah, I like it a lot, _xiang huo_ ," she shot back, the ancient childish spirit returning as it did, only for moments. "I get to listen to computers all day, write in different tongues all day. It's very shiny."

For some reason both of them wondered, at exactly the same time, what it would be like if none of the ugly things had happened.

And as quickly as a dream forgotten, off those ponders went.

"It's gonna be a great environment for my little girl to grow up in."

Mal raised an eyebrow -- he so rarely did this as artfully, but it had always been a treasure for River. Now it was another nail on the coffin. He didn't believe her; maybe he never really had. No girl would grow up well surrounded by teraflops and wires.

"As opposed to jetting between worlds, killing human beings, and being paid vast sums of money?"

Mal's greedy smile would have chilled his mama to the bone. River knew this. Mal's type didn't like killing, unless they were pushed. Like Dr. Mathias, like the pen man who had questioned her, like the nurses and aides that shoved needles in her skull and never asked why. River shivered. A long-held pain reawakened, and still it was less scary than her present danger; still, less painful.

"Precisely," she confirmed. Mal was correct. Mal had always been right, but never correct. River had never believed herself to be dead, and neither had Simon, so she came back. Mal, she realized now, was dying, bullet to his brainpan, blood all over, so violent and disturbing even her mind could only describe it in black and white. Soon he would be dead. Nothing could bring him back. _Needles_ , flashed a vision in her mind, and then --

"Well, my old friend," Mal was saying, "to each her own. However, all cockblockery aside, I am looking forward to meeting your young man.

"I am, more or less, particular whom my gal marries."

He was standing almost on top of her now, still as much a cowboy as the horse he'd ridden here, as the desert they couldn't see, as the boots that covered up the scars on the ankles that could no longer dance -- and she loved him. Loved him even as he murdered her with his mind. Over and over. Loved him because he was unable to escape the prison that kept him in heartache.

"You want to come to the wedding?" she whispered, her throat going dry. It was soon. Either her water would break in thirty minutes, or she would die.

"Only if I can sit on the bride's side."

Mal-That-Was and every part of River reached across time and stretched toward each other; there were fractals and chaos and exploding neutron dummies, but they never were ones to give up, and fingertips touched, and River's tears were gone and the baby, for whatever new world awaited her, would live. River's vision cleared.

"You'll find it a bit lonely on my side," came River's reply, in the same matter-of-fact tone she had used once with a bounty hunter who maybe should have killed them all right then, and left the secret of Miranda to someone else, next time. The Academy was only the first of countless evils.

Again, something about Simon whispered to her that there was evil and evil and evil, but then there were none. She strained to hear the memory. Something about Simon meant something that would pull her back, and she felt the twisting pocketknife and saw the gun he carried, and the hint of something about Simon was enough for her.

"Your side always was a bit lonely," Mal admitted, and his eyes burned and festered and there were coals and pus leaked out of them and bubbled on the ground into slow, acidic oblivion. He lay down next to her, and her blood, still warm, seeped into his shirt, through his suspenders, all over his back, where she used to lie to sleep, where they used to both find comfort.

His blood joined hers, and somehow his was darker, but they mingled like a cheap marbled pattern from prairie fabric in a store just twenty miles away. Lonely, but together in a broken world that needed far more than them for fixin'.

"But I wouldn't sit anywhere else."


End file.
